Poetics of Listening

Occasional writings starting out from the San Francisco poets that will move off in other directions, towards a focus over coming months on Black writers' audio and video performances in the archives, and elsewhere...

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Wednesday, July 23, 2014

A brief summertime post, leaning on visuals, before getting
into other matters closer to Fall. In
the space of a “free” week at midsummer, two occasions for visits — this one as
the first of two parallel entries. (The second looks at Jess’s murals on the
walls of Pauline Kael’s Berkeley house.)

One morning in the history of the detention center, an administrator paid a visit to the barracks where mostly Asian, mostly Chinese immigrants were held confined, and declared the walls were littered with graffiti that needed to be painted over.

Every administration has the chance to get the writings on
the walls painted over, some of them plastering first into the carved
recessions, so that the characters (the “ideograms”) drop backward under sheets
of lead house paint spread on.

Wasn’t it the case that the villages would select their
brightest youth and pool their funds to buy his ticket to be shipped to Gold
Mountain 金山, that the educated kids, the ones who knew poetry, were supposed to
have the best chance of succeeding?

The technique involved writing on the wood first with inkbrushes, then carving the characters away with a sharpened hand-tool, so even
filled up with plaster and painted over, what they wrote left its shadow
impression to be read on the surface.

Didn’t Jon Jang note something the other day, how there are
as many Chinese (say, Chinese American) people living in San Francisco today as
there were inside the fifty United States of America when he was a kid on the
peninsula some forty years ago?

How’d it happen, instead of the National Park Service bulldozing
the detention center flat, a few of the local Chinese Americans came in, got together
and read the walls, transcribing then translating the transcriptions, turning
the building into a book. (*)

The Chinese immigrants (and other Asians, multiple languages
got used) wrote what they carved in the walls of the island barracks as poetry,
where the guards and later some visitors also wrote there, and what they wrote was
mostly not in sentences.

The way sunlight falls into the rooms, so they look stripped down, effective at being filled up with persons passing through them, emptying out one or a few persons at a time, then refilling themselves with new ones moving into the spaces folded open.

The beds they’ve left up to show how the rooms appeared
under use smell of must, mildew, and why wouldn’t they, close to the water,
regularly dosed in fog, no doubt if they had any heat it wasn’t enough to
really warm things enough to prevent that.

How Sean Labrador y Manzano, working with APIA writers addressing
trauma (it’s inscribed even in the fact they’re writing in English, layered over
earlier languages), has a poster for the symposium he’s organized using a
picture of these beds. (**)

It’s basically ‘white’ housepaint (the cheapest?) they
prefer — don’t they? — when arriving on board to clean up the area, mopping up
operations, intended to import some tidiness over this unruly, angular, illegible,
un/translated, silent speech.

________________________

(*) The book in question is still Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim,
and Judy Yung’s great collectively authored work, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910–1940, HOC DOI (History of Chinese Detained on Island), a project of
the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, begun 1976—published 1980—subsequent
edition available from University of Washington Press; their work transcribes
and translates to American English much of the poetry from the barrack walls,
with contextualizing history and oral histories based on interviews with those local
migrants who were still available and would talk with them about Angel Island.

About Me

"Nothing promises that you will wish to self-fragilize in front of an author, or a painting, or a film, to such a degree that it will con/cern you, and its musicality will start to work for you." (Bracha Ettinger)